Thursday, November 06, 2008

From the "When you put it like that…" file.

· Get the USA out of Iraq. This is the majority position in the country, the centrist view.

· Protect women's right to choose along with access to safe abortions and birth control in all areas of the country. The clear majority of Americans want abortion and birth control to be legal and accessible, which makes protecting these the most centrist position available.

· Establish a national system of healthcare. The majority of Americans are dissatisfied with our current system and want to see everyone in the country provided with access to care.

· Nothing is more quintessentially American, nothing more centrist than the idea that Americans, more than anyone else in the world, are free to chart their own course through life. No idea is embraced by more Americans of all political stripes than that we are a free nation. Therefore, the centrist position for Obama is to tear down the roadblocks to full equality for the LBGTQ community that religious extremists have been able to erect. Full marriage equality for all Americans is the centrist position, all others are extremist.

· Also central to the character of America is the idea that anyone, no matter the circumstances of their birth, can become wealthy, or famous, or powerful depending solely upon their desires and willingness to work hard. A corollary to this idea is that we have no aristocracy. This is not a nation set up to reward people simply for being born. Therefore, Obama should follow the eminently centrist path of reforming our tax code and corporate regulatory regime so that the children and friends of the rich and powerful are no longer rewarded for merely existing.

Personally, I'm fine with "governing from the center" if it's done with the understanding that at the very heart of everything American lies the ideological and philosophical underpinnings of the framers of the Constitution, liberalism. The Constitution is nothing more than a blueprint for the governance of a liberal nation, which is why conservatives always make such a hash of it. Their essentially non- (if not anti-) American ideology is simply incompatible with the operation of our government as it is designed.